Table of Contents

Contents
Contributors
Introduction: Britten's Music and its Audiences
Philip Rupprecht
I Public and Private
1 On Ambiguity in Britten
Paul Kildea
2 "O Hurry to the Fêted Spot of your Deliberate Fall": Death in Britten, 1936-1940
Stephen Arthur Allen
3 Love Knots: Britten, Pears, and the Sonnet
Lloyd Whitesell
II Opera
4 Britten, Grimes, and the "Tuneful Air"
Arved Ashby
5 Post-War Women in Britten
J.P.E. Harper-Scott
6 Be Flat or Be Natural? Pitch Symbolism in Britten's Operas
Mervyn Cooke
III Post-War Encounters
7 Britten and the Avant-Garde in the 1950s
Philip Rupprecht
8 Curlew River and Cultural Encounter
Heather Wiebe
9 Britten's Rhetoric of Resistance: the Works for Rostropovich
Arnold Whittall
IV Late Modern
10 An Excess of Less? Critiquing Britten's Late Song-Cycles
Christopher Mark
11 Animating Owen Wingrave: Ghosts and Global Television
Danielle Ward-Griffin
12 The Dye-line Rehearsal Scores for Death in Venice
Christopher Wintle
Works Cited
Index

About the Author

Philip Rupprecht is Associate Professor of Music at Duke University. He is the author of Britten's Musical Language (Cambridge) and co-editor of Tonality 1900-1950: Concept and Practice (Steiner, 2012).

Reviews

"[M]asterfully blends multiple modes of inquiry and reestablishes Britten as a seminal composer of modernist and postmodern artistic accomplishment... Highly recommended." --Choice